by Ginger Booth
“The skirts!” she complained over their comm channel. Who knew whether the locals had comms built-in to their beaks. The Spaceways crew certainly did. Unfortunately, the local women wore voluminous dull brown skirts, at least the goatherds they spotted from the air.
“Wad it between your legs,” Ben suggested. “You need your hands on the gravity and the mask.”
Clay ribbed him, “You often sky-dive in skirts?”
“It stands to reason,” Ben defended himself.
Elise complained, “You try wadding a dress between your legs without using your hands!”
“Next time I wear skirts,” Ben promised. “Elise, hurry up. Nobody cares about your underwear.”
“I of course care about your underwear,” Remi contradicted him. “I await with breathless anticipation. My imagination is aflame, mon cher. Have I asked, if you and the great Dr. Teke are, shall we say…”
“Over,” Elise supplied. “We broke off. I am too old for him.”
“Ah. Really?” Remi pounced in interest. “And how old might that be? I myself am 44.” His previous lover, Husna Zales, was nearing eighty, her nanites due to expire soon to dump her into a sudden and brief old age. Sass and Husna didn’t get along well enough to ship out again together. They all appeared in their twenties, hence the need to ask.
“I am 42!” Elise replied in dulcet tones already edging toward Saggy flirt mode. Her French accent and musical singsong grew stronger. “Too old for Teke. At that age to wonder, shall I have another child? Shall I not? I never dreamed you might be interested, Monsieur Roy! Now, are you from Roy Dome? One of those Roys?”
“Mais oui,” Remi concurred. “Le Bourgeois le Roy, he is my elder brother. So little sense of humor –”
Ben tuned out the foreplay. He peered upward to a flapping mess of skirt parachute still well above the 20-meter height of the wall. “Elise, goose your juice! Get down here! Remi, I had no idea we were frustrating your sex life, splitting you two between ships.”
“Gauche!” Elise critiqued.
“Cretin!” Remi agreed. “We make love, not sex. Where is the joie de vivre, the panache, l’amour?”
“You caught the part where I don’t speak French, right?” Ben returned. “Elise, hurry up before you’re spotted. You remember they have guns?”
Freshly inspired, she plopped to the ground seconds later, rolling backward skirts over beak, then untangling herself. Darkness and roll direction shielded her underwear.
Finally assembled, Ben asked whether anyone spotted their route in. From high orbit, they saw what seemed to be roll-up emergency ladders under windows high on the wall. Down at ground level the fortification was blank and curved upward, the better to hail intruders with boiling oil, arrows, and rotten tomatoes, or whatever they used in their war games.
Must be fun to live in a Renaissance theme park.
Now 77 years after the mass settlers arrived, they lived the park as reality.
No one spotted an unfurled rope ladder on the way down. But a slight glimmer of weak LEDs showed by each narrow window. Mainly these were red, the standard signal that the chamber beyond held unequal atmosphere or pressure. But Clay claimed he glimpsed a green one as he zoomed past. They walked thataway, Elise still struggling with her skirts.
“Now, sure, she wants to bunch between my legs.”
“Oh, most fortunate of skirts,” Remi returned.
Clay chuckled softly. Ben barked, “Remi? Stop that.”
“Oh, but Ben!” Elise crooned. “On Sagamore, we read English for technical manuals. Work, facts. In French, we read novels of Paris and romance!”
“Yes, this night is very romantic,” Remi concurred.
“Also very long,” Ben muttered. “But not long enough if we don’t get in there soon.” As usual, the 50-hour local solar day didn’t match human circadian rhythms. Eli theorized that the Cantons used a 25-hour day and called it 24 like Mahina, and mapped 06:00 to dawn and sunset. This was based on a farming argument. They really had no idea. Even after Prosper snuck up close, the better to eavesdrop, the locals didn’t seem to broadcast radio. Eli’s team located where the big space transmitter used to be, on one of these wall turrets on the Deutschland city-state. Another was sited on Steppe, Cantons’ largest moon, the Russian colony.
But the two worlds appeared to have little to say to each other. Or at least Ben’s geeks didn’t intercept anything. The ship AIs detected no space travel in this system in the past decade. Traces older than that, their instruments couldn’t discern.
Dawn was due in two hours. All three moons lurked below the horizon, making this the darkest Cantons ever got. Now was the time to sneak in.
“There!” Clay breathed. He took a running start, then scaled the wall using rotated gravity. None of them needed the ladder unfurled. They jogged morning laps around the ship by rotating their gravity floor to wall to overhead and down, as well as horizontally along the catwalk.
No, the prize was a window set to external air pressure and gas mix. If they broke one of the other windows, it was sure to set off an alarm. Of course, for all they knew, they could simply stroll in through the main gates. But after a week of study, they decided to look around first in secrecy, since they couldn’t open a dialogue directly.
Three foreign starships appearing after 77 years of solitude had the potential to be shocking and destabilizing. And people in power didn’t enjoy being blindsided. Spaceways could land one or three spaceships somewhere and make a grand entrance. But with gun emplacements guarding every city-state, Ben preferred to know a little more about who they were talking to. For instance, which city-state would be most conducive to dialogue.
Clay successfully opened the narrow window and slipped in, while Ben kept rear guard. After a few moments, Clay stuck an arm out to help Elise and her voluminous skirts inside.
Below, Ben heard a snatch of foreign conversation and flattened against the wall. He tugged on Remi’s shirt to suggest he hurry. Two black shapes emerged below, rounding the closest tower protruding from the long wall of the city. The historically-inclined claimed that these outcroppings in the wall provided cross-fire positions and improved visibility on an approaching enemy. Accustomed to giant meteorite-killer guns, Ben couldn’t help feeling the castle fortifications were silly. Guards walking around the foot of the walls, instead of cameras and motion detectors, made little sense to him either. But that’s what they seemed to be doing. Each carried a long…pole?
Remi tugged on him, now inside the chamber. Ben gave the dark figures below another glance. He removed his backpack first, and passed it in. Then he slipped sideways through the window himself. Very slowly, he pushed the side-hinged window shut. The inner casement offered thick curtains, so he pulled them closed before pushing the button to restore breathable air. The airlock controls beside the window were utilitarian and self-explanatory.
“Lights?” Clay offered from across the room.
“Sure,” Ben agreed. “What’s in –”
Suddenly a couple soft yellow lights revealed they stood in a cozy bedchamber. The walls were papered in flowers. Spindly furniture pretended to be dark wood paired with once-white stained upholstery and linens. A flick of Ben’s fingernail reported the weight-bearing structures formed of something closer to foamcrete or plastic. This world offered no forests for wood. A small round rag-style rug softened a scrap of hard floor, painted dark red with scuffed lines of chalk. Two fragile-looking dim table lamps wore ruffled cloth lamp-shades, a fussy fashion new to Ben. The general air of the room was a cheap rental devoid of personal possessions.
Except the most striking feature, a single pinned poster took up half a short wall. A demon’s red skin gleamed over well-pumped muscles. Woolly black hair parted for curving sheep’s horns. The dresser-top below bore candlesticks, a sooty bowl, and a letter-opener knife. Assorted other knickknacks meant nothing to him.
“Satanic altar.” Clay crossed himself. The pair of Saggies followed his example.
Ben shrugged. “Meaning?”
Elise shivered and raised her eyebrows in excitement. “This room worships evil!”
“Awesome. Good thing we’re not staying.” The air tell-tale flicked to green beside the doorway out. Ben keyed his comms. “Zan, we’re in. How’s Sass coming along?”
23
In daylight, the pompous stonework that formed the hexagonal fortress of Britain reminded Sass of the Tower of London. Or maybe Winchester Cathedral or Buckingham Palace. British aristocracy meant nothing to her when she lived on Earth, and that was a long time ago. But the many-windowed Gothic structure before her did remind her of London.
It wasn’t daylight now, rather pitch black. And unlike France, the Brits didn’t police the stunted excuse for trees on this world, gnarly shrubs that crept along boggy ground. Her boots alternated between catching on the failed Earth imports and sucking in the mud. Wisps of the rotten-egg sulfur mist snaked by. Like London, it was also chilly and drizzling. The acid rain would aggravate their skin, but hopefully they wouldn’t be in it long enough to matter. Their nanites could fix a little dead skin.
She was beginning to despair of spotting a green airlock light. Her plan to sneak in was the same as Ben’s. Zan dropped her team off second, then retreated to hide at ‘base camp,’ a fairly level shelf of rock 50 klicks west, outside the rugged plain of the city-states.
Cope tripped and went sprawling again, landing on hands and a knee. “That’s it. I’m done.” He flicked his gravity around and strode up the wall. Kassidy immediately followed suit.
“We’re trying to fit in!” Sass hissed at them.
“But we don’t,” Cope pointed out. His mask featured a bug-eyed frog.
Kassidy snickered from within a snarling purple pterodactyl beak. “Give up, Sass. Unless we find a window, we’re going in through the main gates.”
Sass sighed and conceded defeat. One of her keys to leadership was to notice when her entourage quit following. At least the engineer humored her. The outrageously rich and popular starlet tended to do what she felt like, without warning.
Sass readjusted her cartoon grade mask by its giant nose – complete with mustache and bushy eyebrows raised in astonishment. And she followed her followers up the Gothic pile.
“False windows,” Cope reported, squatting beside the one currently at his feet. “No wonder.” He rapped it. “Plastic decor.” More cautiously, he rapped the ‘stone’ wall. “Foamcrete?”
“I’m relieved,” Sass replied. “Mining this much stone is ridiculous.”
Each of the six sides of hexagonal Britain stretched 25 meters high and eight kilometers long, undulating with the hilly lay of the land. Olympia Zhao, a goldmine of Cantons founding trivia, explained that each city-state was planned to encompass its original population at an acre per person. Judging by the rather barren domed interiors, the need hadn’t arisen. Britain’s majestic walls, like the rest, were hollow.
Kassidy scampered ahead to the top of the wall, blithely assuming all the windows were fakes like the lower ones.
Suddenly a window flew open right behind her, flooding the scene with yellow light. “What the –?” a man bellowed. One beefy shoulder hung out the casement, clad in a bulging T-shirt. The bruiser’s mask bore the chubby snarl of the British army uniforms. He ducked back inside to grab a long stick like a shepherd’s crook. Hampered by the narrow confines of his window, he stuck the pole out and took a swipe at Cope. The engineer simply backed away.
“Spies!” the man hollered. “Frenchy intruders! Scaling the walls! Sound the alarm!”
“Down!” Sass declared.
But Cope snagged her elbow and dragged her upward instead. “He seems gravity-challenged.”
“Not the top!” Kassidy yelled. She ran ahead toward the closest turret jutting outward from the curtain wall, a klick away. “Dome anchors above the wall!”
So they ran, perpendicular to the wall. By the dim starlit glimmer, this provided the first decent footing they’d found on this trip. The crew jogged twenty minutes a day on Thrive and Prosper, a constructive habit Sass instilled when trips between moons, let alone planets, took weeks. The muscle-bound soldier, still hollering for them to come back, soon fell behind.
Their steps slowed as they closed with the turret. Its windows turned out to be real, and lit with a low glow. “Down!” Sass attempted again. This time the team took her advice. The ground was paved at the foot of this segment, a promising sign.
They followed the path around to an imposing door, dimly lit to show off the greenish patina of its towering bronze mass. However, a modest door-within-the-door showed a red light, typical of an airlock. When Sass reached it, she simply hauled it open by the doorknob.
No alarms, no nothing. “Safety design,” she mused. “Secure the airlock on the inside, not the outside, so people won’t run out of air.”
Cope argued, “But we’re wearing rebreathers. We won’t suffocate just because a door won’t open.” By then all three were inside the small airlock, crowded by their laden backpacks. Unlike Elise, Kassidy and Sass opted to wear the baggy pleated brown pants with work shirts. Cope, after careful study of the natives, elected to wear a Schuyler Jailbirds T-shirt over worn blue jeans and his usual steel-toed work boots. He wouldn’t blend in, but then, at his height, he wouldn’t blend in no matter what he did.
The social status of their racial mix was an open question. According to Olympia Zhao’s fun facts, Britain was the only nation to include citizens of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian descent, heritages prominent in Cope and Kassidy’s features. The vicious migrant wars in Europe toward the end left grudges. Non-Europeans greatly outnumbered white people. This embroiled them in social warfare between classes, races, accepting young versus rejecting old, educated versus working class. The Europe of Sass’s youth was a mess. Though in fairness, the Europeans opinion of Americans was at least as low.
But Sass and Clay were unsurprised to learn who got refugee ship slots – the white Europeans. Blond herself, Sass should fit in fine in any of the city-states, and Elise and Remi as well. But they suspected Cope and Kassidy could only pass for Brits. Clay, on Ben’s team, hoped to masquerade as a sunburnt Spaniard. Given his conspicuous good looks, Sass doubted he could ‘pass’ as anything. But Ben hoped to check out Iberia and Italia after France, relying on Clay’s fluent Spanish.
Cope did the honors with the air pressure button. A fresh nitrox mix hissed in. When the light turned green, Sass pulled off her mask and breathed deep. The little chamber reeked of urine, mildew, and sulfur. The rego stuff clung to their clothes from the damp mist. The dirt buildup in the corners of the vestibule looked like no one had cleaned in decades. Graffiti was scribbled here and there, none decipherable.
“So we volunteer to be arrested as spies, and speak to the authorities?” Sass reasoned aloud.
Cope tried the handle on the inner door, which simply opened. “Let’s not.”
A barrel ‘stone’ tunnel, perhaps eight meters long and dripping, led to an impressive portcullis onto a dark street. The gate was locked. While Cope got busy figuring out how to jimmy it, Sass and Kassidy pressed their faces to the bars to drink in the neighborhood.
Tudor, Sass thought vaguely. The half-timbered look, dark beams outlining the structure, painted stucco-like in between, second floors overhanging the first. Heavy planters hung beneath the upper windows. The ground floor establishments were shuttered in this pre-dawn, but bore signs. The corner one close enough to make out bore a picture of a pig. Sass hoped she wasn’t dealing with an illiterate society again.
The street lay deserted at this hour, as she hoped. Job one was to acquire money. She had items for hock, including Mahina ice wands, Sagamore emergency airlock bubbles, and Denali loincloth skins. With money, they could buy authentic clothes, and hopefully train fare to tour the other northern countries. No guarantees, but they hoped Benelux and Scandia also understood English. Their European ancestors did. But English fell out of
favor toward the end as a common tongue, as Brits and Americans grew increasingly unpopular, and Germany held the purse strings.
Kassidy launched camera drones before Sass could stop her. She scowled in disapproval. But on her pocket comm, the younger woman showed her the view as the drones first scouted left up the intersection before them. The system had advantages. Kassidy could brighten the image without lighting the street. Yes, the half-timbered theme look extended the whole block. The wall side looked odd at 7 stories, rather high for crappy Tudor construction. They’d already confirmed from remote observation that the wall itself was residential, presumably military toward the top. The facing side of the street looked slightly more authentic, only three full floors plus a bonus window under the steep eaves.
One drone examined the signs for each ground-level storefront. “Pubs,” Sass murmured, as Kassidy frowned at a wordless crown. Then she had to explain how pubs differed from the American-descended bars on Mahina. Some of the wooden-look shutters bore stylized pictures of what the establishment might look like if it were open – a butcher shop, a grocer. Oddly, the painted patrons wore masks.
At the next intersection, Kassidy turned onto the street leaving the wall. Two doors in, the architecture transitioned abruptly to a blank brick row-house mill-town look. The short block terminated with high brick walls around back gardens to either side, and blocking off access deeper into the interior. A dispirited pocket park inhabited the end of the street, with a see-saw and swing set, one swing broken.
Reconnaissance by drone had its advantages. Kassidy turned the pair right to fly over the back gardens. An alley passed behind those, then huge glassed-over industrial greenhouses. Where they grow the food. Sass picked out hops, potatoes, and cabbage nearby.
The compact yards were a mixed bag, some an urban oasis for entertaining, others vegetable gardens or play space for kids. A couple lights were on. Kassidy lurked to spy on people essentially fixing breakfast or otherwise getting ready for the day. Good confirmation, we guessed the clock right. Probably.